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A Mom's blog about wellness, self-growth, natural living, following passions, spirituality, working from home and family travel. Reviews too!

Monday

The family that eats together.....

You know, my FB status update the other day made me think about something.

I wrote" I had to go to the store to get soup ingredients today. this weather simply CALLS for soup :-) french onion for me, chicken to J, noodle for K and chili for T"

Which I'm sure to some people seems ludicrous. Making 4 soups for 4 people? Unheard of in some homes right?

I mean, I grew up eating what Mom made. We all sat together and ate the same meal.That was just the way it was in the 70's. Maybe it's still that way for families. And my family DOES do that very often.
But I am not averse to making an individual meal for a kid. Or heck, even for me. We are all different people and we all have different tastes. While I won't do it every night and certainly not for a "I'm not in the mood for chicken" sort of thing, I will do it based on one simple memory.

I don't like red meat.

And I was forced to eat it as a child. Both my parents are huge red meat eaters. Seafood and red meat. and they are 2 foods I just don't like. And rarely rarely eat.

I remember the disgust I felt at hearing meatloaf was for dinner. Or the smell pot roast (I would pick out the potatoes and carrots-I loved that part of the dinner!)
Or the complete nausea I felt one day when the bus pulled up to my house and I saw a freshly killed deer hanging off a tree in our backyard. Come to think of it, THAT is the ONLY memory I have of ever being on the bus when I lived at that house. Kindergarten through 5th and 1 memory of getting off the bus?
Strong memory.
I don't know WHY I don't like red meat. I just kinda don't.
In my teens and 20's, if I ate a hamburger at a party, it had to be cooked until it resembled a hockey puck. Then it was layered with 4 tomatoes, 3 onions, tons of ketchup and some lettuce so it was barely discernible as meat. My father died when he saw me with it. His was a nice juicy pinkalicious color.

If I HAD to eat meat now, I would. If there's a speck of meat in a sauce on some pasta when I'm at a party, I'm not going to freak out anymore. And I do eat chicken and turkey occasionally so it's not ALL meat I'm talking about. I'm definitely what they call a "flexitarian" which is a flexible vegetarian.I had a teeny bite of my son's chili the other day to see if it was OK(my chili was beans only). I like to think that I'm even a flexitarian on a lot of aspects in my life. Doesn't that sound ideal?

But getting back to tastes, I respect that everyone has different tastes. And as I'm off to make my French Onion Soup now, I know some of you will gag at that thought. Sometimes I add mushrooms to my soup. Other people hate mushrooms. VEGGIE meals just make me drool. Peppers and onions excite me, what can I say?

As long as MY family is at MY table and we are enjoying our meals together, then the family that eats together...is a strong loving unit that can't be broken by individual tastes.